Slate magazine has an article on the highest paid actor in Asia after Jackie Chan. It’s Superstar Rajinikanth, a south Indian actor. The author of the article, like the rest of the world, had an epiphany about India and all things related to it.

Read the entire article. Here’s my response to some key excerpts:

But the No. 2 spot goes to someone who doesn’t make any sense at all. The second-highest-paid actor in Asia is a balding, middle-aged man with a paunch, hailing from the Indian state of Tamil Nadu and sporting the kind of moustache that went out of style in 1986.

Oh no! you didn’t. Did you just say all that in one little paragraph? I am not sure how much of truth is there in that paragraph but I am sure of one thing. Grady Hendrix, author of the Slate article, will never visit Tamil Nadu. If he has to, then he has to use a different name, George Bush or something.

In the first scene of Padayappa (1999), he’s asked, “Hey man, who are you?” and his answer is a four-minute musical number in which he plays the harmonica, flips through the air, oversees a massive martial-arts demonstration, and then morphs into a baby.

Remember elevator speech? That’s Padayappa’s elevator speech in that movie. The elevator took a while to reach the destination.

He works in the Tamil film industry, Bollywood’s poorer Southern cousin

Poorer southern cousin?

At 61 years old, Rajinikanth has made more than 150 movies in India, and he isn’t even a proper Bollywood star.

What do you mean not even a proper Bollywood star? Who exactly is a proper Bollywood star and why should anyone be a proper Bollywood star?

If you haven’t heard of Rajinikanth before, you will on Oct. 1, when his movie Enthiran (The Robot) opens around the world. It’s the most expensive Indian movie of all time. It’s getting the widest global opening of any Indian film ever made, with 2,000 prints exploding onto screens simultaneously

It is not my fault that you woke up on a fine September morning and discovered Rajinikanth. Rajini Kanth is 61 years old and has acted in 151 movies. He is a phenomenon and his movies are blockbusters. The business his movies does is something the so-called proper Bollywood stars can only dream of.  This did not happen overnight and has been the case for a good part of the past 20 years. The question then is not if Rajinikanth makes sense at number two position in Asia? But the real question is, why did you take so long to know about Rajinikanth? Which part of India were you stuck at?

But as ridiculous as Rajinikanth is, he’s also in on the joke. In Sivaji: The Boss (2007) he’s a software engineer returning from overseas to battle political corruption and Wall Street-style fatcats.

As ridiculous as Rajinikanth is? One can have a dream within a dream within a dream and Superstar Rajinikanth cannot be a software engineer? Can you explain the ridiculous part one more time please?

Grady Hendrix appears to have done a lot of research on Rajinikanth. Out of the whole article Grady might have gotten one thing right :

If a tiger had sex with a tornado and then their tiger-nado baby got married to an earthquake, their offspring would be Rajinikanth.

That could possibly save Grady.

Then he punches some goon so hard that he flies through the windshield of a minivan and continues on out the back window

You can download a program to your brain and bike away without spending anytime learning to bike. And you cannot hit a man so hard that he comes out of the other side of a minivan? Double standards, don’t you think?

Because Rajinikanth, like a Tamil Nadu Cyrano de Bergerac, is the epitome of manly Indian style and, like Cyrano, when one day he goes to his grave, he’ll cling to the one thing they can’t take away from him, the one thing that has mattered most to him in his life: his panache.

When a movie is made and released there are two kinds of people who has to be happy. The audience who spend the money for the movie and the producers and distributors who pay for the movie. Rajinikanth takes care of both the parties. Simple. No?